Hello and welcome to a history of the United States.

Episode 103, Pitt and Fox. Things were not looking good

in Whitehall. As the summer of 1755 progressed, Prime Minister Newcastle was met by a terrible series of events.

Firstly, the Royal Navy had been unable to stop French reinforcements reaching Canada,

and then that the army had met disaster at Monongahela.

And the commander-in-chief, Braddock, was killed.

This placed Newcastle in a very difficult position domestically and internationally. I want to begin today with an explanation of the

domestic difficulties Newcastle was facing, and for that, we need to return once more to the

nuances of the British political system.

My apologies if what I'm about to say is a bit obvious to you, but we really all need to be on the same page here.

To be completely honest, I'm going to be quite glad when we shift completely to the US Constitution in 1789. It's rather straightforward when compared to how

the British system works. Separation of powers makes things a lot simpler. You have Congress split

into the Senate and the House of Representatives as the legislature, whose job it is to create laws.

You have the President, the Executive, whose job it is to ensure the laws are carried out,

and the Supreme Court, the Judiciary, whose job it is to interpret whether the laws are allowed by the Constitution.

That's a bit of an oversimplification,

but it's good enough for our purposes right now.

Now, in comparison, the British system has the House of Lords, the House of Commons,

Parliament, the Prime Minister, the Cabinet and the Monarchy, all with interlocking membership and responsibility, and that's just

the legislature and the executive, never mind the judiciary. I'm not going to touch that with a

10-foot barge pole. We spent a great number of episodes covering British political developments

over the 17th century and how the monarchy transitioned from

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